چکیده انگلیسی

Globalization has transformed companies to enterprises over the last 50 years. Computing and communication have also transformed production and service organizations over the past 50 years. While parallelism, error recovery, and conflict resolution have been addressed by human workers since the early days of industry, they have recently been transformed by computer-integrated functions. A major concern in the global market is agility. The agility of enterprises is considered an increasingly important factor of economic competitiveness. We view it from two perspectives: businessandorganizationalagility, and operationalandlogisticsagility. In the business and organizational perspective of agility, our research has developed an analytic method called distributed parallel integration evaluation model (DPIEM). Its purpose is organizing/reorganizing resources among distributed, networked organizations, based on the parallelism theory of computing and communication. In terms of operational and logistics agility in such distributed organizations, our research has suggested that the connection between the autonomy functions and agility requires significant functions of error detection and recovery (EDR), and conflictresolution (CR). The impact of both functions on the operational and logistics agility is analyzed and illustrated. The article concludes with several theoretical observations about the role of information technology (IT) in modern, distributed and networked enterprises.

مقدمه انگلیسی

The impacts of modern information technology (IT) on distributed, networked enterprise systems can be classified into three categories: (1) speeding up activities; (2) providing intelligent and autonomous decision-making processes; and (3) enabling distributed operations with collaboration along communication networks. All three categories lead to agility. The impacts of IT not only can improve productivity and quality of production and service activities, but also enable enterprises to intelligently alter themselves and the way they interact. They can now collaborate with each other to best adapt to various customers' demand changes in tastes, design, time, and quantity, while keeping the cost at a reasonable level. Such enterprises are hence termed agileenterprises.
One of the goals of enterprises is to satisfy customers' demands as much as possible within economic and ethical constrains. Such a goal is usually difficult to achieve because of the following possible limitations.
(1) Automation equipment is unable to intelligently and on a timely basis handle high-level specification changes and unexpected breakdowns.
(2) Vendors and suppliers along the supply chain do not, themselves, have enough capacity in terms of resources, operations, and transportation to handle all the desirable changes within reasonable time.
(3) Required design changes cannot be efficiently delivered to all the associated departments, suppliers, and vendors.
(4) In order to handle complex demands from customers, an enterprise may have to maintain a huge organization. Such an organization usually encounters high overhead. Worse yet, the proportion of overhead becomes even larger in terms of production costs when the market demands decrease.
For decades, researchers have been seeking to develop an agile enterprise that can cope with the above limitations, while keeping costs at a reasonable level. Modern IT seems to have paved a way to achieve this goal. However, to effectively benefit from IT for agility, an enterprise must still rely on detailed and systematic design and implementation. In this article, enterprises are assumed to be internetworked, and enterprise agility is considered in two parts: businessandorganizationalagility and operationalandlogisticsagility. For business and organizational agility, the main concerns are focused here on studying the parallel relationships between tasks and resources among the distributed organizations, so the total integration cost can be minimized. For operational and logistics agility, the main concerns are the capability of each individual enterprise (or subsidiary) to handle its own errors and resolve conflicts while interacting and collaborating with other enterprises.
The organization of this article is as follows. In Section 2, associated ITs that influence networked enterprise agility are introduced with functions. Section 3 presents business and organizational agility from a perspective of parallelism, while Section 4 presents operational and logistics agility from perspectives of error detection and recovery (EDR), and conflict resolution (CR). Concluding remarks and future research are addressed in Section 5.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

In this article, the impacts of IT on networked enterprise activities are illustrated by seven function categories. The seven functions contribute in different ways to three measures of performance: productivity, flexibility, and agility. Furthermore, enterprise agility is decomposed into two classes: business and organizational agility and operational and logistics agility. Business and organizational agility is a useful measure in the design of integrated, networked enterprises, particularly with the benefit of parallelism among their distributed subsidiaries. The design of enterprises with this agility can be supported by an analytical method called DPIEM. DPIEM assists designers in determining the number of resources required in each organization for effective execution of given interrelated tasks, while keeping the total integration cost minimal. Once an optimized plan is designed for the distributed, networked enterprise, its operational and logistics agility also needs to be addressed.
Our research has related autonomy functions, and operational and logistics agility. Two key autonomy functions, EDR and CR, are described as important for the operational and logistics agility of networked enterprises. Two theoretical conclusions are developed in this article:
1.
When a system has a relatively higher probability of becoming disabled by errors, EDR is essential to secure the system with a high level of agility;
2.
If human communications and operations are applied in CR, relatively larger, possibly prohibitive costs may be incurred. Because IT support of CR can reduce the CR cost, it is recommended to apply IT support of CR as much as possible.
Although these conclusions may seem intuitive, the analysis provides theoretical, quantitative models to evaluate them. This article also proposes to use agents to represent distributed, networked enterprise systems. Many operational and logistics conflicts between the distributed systems, to a relatively large extent, can be resolved by the agents autonomously. However, effective interaction and information exchange protocols are necessary to enable the agents working together to resolve conflicts collaboratively.
Modern IT has made enterprises agile in many dimensions [9]. However, without the supporting autonomy functions of error recovery, CR, and system networking robustness, agile enterprises cannot successfully achieve their goals. Methodologies for preventing an agile, networked enterprise from becoming vulnerable need further investigation.